Transcription
Meta ads have changed again. What worked 12 months ago is already becoming outdated. And if you're still relying on old strategies, you're leaving a lot of money on the table.
In this video, I'm going to break down a number of meta ad strategies and techniques that are working really well right now, including what's changed, what's quietly dominating behind the scenes, and how you can use it to scale profitably.
Strategy number one is to use value rules. I'm a big fan of value rules because they allow you to have the best of both worlds when it comes to targeting. With value rules, you can influence who Meta puts your ads in front of without having to overly restrict them through hard targeting constraints. So, you can have the best of both worlds. You can have open targeting and the full flexibility that Meta wants to be able to work out exactly who to put your ads in front of, but give it direction towards your most valuable prospects or customers.
Let me quickly show you what this looks like. So, I'm here inside an example meta ad account and get to the value rules section. I come over here and click on advertising settings. Then select value rules and then go ahead and click on create a rule set. Then I need to select my criteria. Many different options here. Conversion location, age, gender, etc., etc. Let's say I go with age. I may have analyzed my customer data and worked out that people over 35 are more valuable to my business. Perhaps they are more likely to convert from lead to eventual client. Perhaps they are more likely to stick on my subscription service for longer. Perhaps they are more likely to buy again from my e-commerce store. Different use cases for different businesses. So let's say I've identified that they're more valuable to my business. Select all the age ranges above 35. And then I select by how much I want to increase my bid. Let's say I've worked out those people are 30% more valuable than others. I can go ahead and add in 30 in here. Give the rule a name. Go ahead and click next. Give the rule set a name. 35 plus. Click create. I can now add that into my campaigns and that into my adset. and Meta will continue to advertise to people that are both over 35 and under 35, but it is going to favor the people that are over 35 be willing to pay more in the auction to reach those people because we've told Meta they're more valuable to my business. So, like I said at the beginning, a great way to have the best of both worlds when it comes to targeting. You don't need to have this trade-off between hard constraints but small audience versus open targeting. You can go with this option instead.
Strategy number two is to define your audience segments. So, Meta breaks down the audience that you're reaching into three different segments. You've got new audience, you've got engaged audience, and you've got existing customers. So, it's really important to take a few minutes, it doesn't take very long at all, and get, for example, your customer list uploaded to your Meta Ad account and then define in advertising settings that audience being existing customers. You want to do the same with your engaged audience, which is going to be people that are warm. They've interacted with your business before, but they haven't actually bought. So this could be website visitors, people on your email list but not your customer list, people who have engaged with you across the meta apps. You can very quickly and easily do this in advertising settings. If we jump back to advertising settings, we've got here in this example ad account these already defined where we've got engaged audience for example which we've defined as our all website visitors 180 and we've got existing customers where we've got an example customer list uploaded. I have separate videos go into more details about how to do that, how to set it up, but really valuable to do because it allows Meta to better allocate budget across cold, warm, and hot audience, which is what these three categories are. You also able to see in breakdown data when you're looking at your results at your campaign, adset, or even ad level, the split of spend, but also where your results are coming from. How many of our purchases are coming from existing customers versus from new audience? What's the cost per purchase look like across those audiences? You can do the same with with cost per lead. Takes a few minutes. Well worth doing.
Number three is to produce way more ad creative. We now aim for 20 different ad creatives per ad set. We used to be limited to six. That's what Meta used to recommend. But post Andromeda, things have really changed. Meta is now prioritizing creative diversity. They want lots of different ad creative in the same adset because it allows them to do a few different things. Firstly, it allows them to personalize ad delivery. So, they're not going to put the same ads in front of everyone. They're not going to work out from your six ads previously, this is the best performer. Let's put that in front of everyone. Instead, they're going to work out, this person's probably going to be more interested in this ad, but this person's probably going to be more interested in this ad. Meta obviously has the data to be able to make those calculations, and that's what the Andromeda update is going to help with. So, the more diversity you have amongst your ad creative, so different formats, different styles, different looks, the more you're going to be able to benefit from that. Also, it really helps with ad fatigue. The more creative diversity you have and the more different ads you have in an adset, the longer it will take for them to fatigue. If someone sees the same ad seven or eight times, even in a 2 or three day period, they might get pretty bored of it. I've seen that. Yeah, get it. Whatever. But if you've got lots of different ads and Meta is showing one ad in the morning, a different ad in the afternoon, different ad the next morning, etc. to that that one individual, it's going to take much longer before they become bored of it. you get past the I've seen this before, therefore I can scroll on filter much quicker. So really important to produce extra ad creative.
How do you go about doing that? Well, firstly, embrace different formats. Doesn't all have to be video. Video is the best performing ad format for most advertisers, but we want to make sure we've got a range of formats live at any one time. Different people interested in different formats is part of the reason, but also it's much quicker and easier to create lots of say image variations than it is to create lots of extra videos. That's the first thing. Secondly, embrace Meta's variation options. So, when you're uploading your imagery to the ad platform, you go through the creative setup process. Meta is often going to use AI to suggest variations of that image. By all means, take advantage of those. And you can use external tools that use AI to help you with this, too.
One of the biggest reasons small budgets fail on meta isn't targeting is the creatives. Because testing properly requires variations, and variations cost money. A single UGC video from a creator, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. an agency to consistently produce and test new creatives, thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per month. And that's before you even know if the ads convert. If you're working with a small budget, that math just doesn't work. Holo flips that part of the equation. You just paste in only your website URL, and it analyzes your brand voice, positioning, and visuals. Then generates ready to publish ads, social posts, and email campaigns. But what makes this powerful for small budgets is the variations. Instead of giving you one creative, it can generate batches of different hooks, angles, formats, and layouts in seconds. You can tweak the size, swap visuals, adjust colors, change the messaging, translate it into another language, or even turn a static image into a video without starting from scratch each time. No prompts, no Canva marathons, no waiting weeks on freelancers. And here's why this matters for small budget advertisers. Meta rewards iteration. The people who win aren't always the ones spending the most. They're the ones testing the most. If you can create 10 to 20 creative variations quickly without spending thousands on production, you suddenly have leverage. Instead of spending your budget on creative production, you can spend it on actual ad testing. What used to take hours or cost thousands now takes minutes. For solo founders and small teams, that removes the biggest bottleneck in Facebook ads. Producing enough creatives to find a winner. If creative costs have been holding you back from testing properly, Holo is definitely worth looking at. There is a link in the description and a discount code if you want to try it.
Strategy number four is to use partnership ads. Now, this is linked to the previous point I made around creating more ad creative. Partnership ads will certainly help you do that. Just to quickly explain what they are, partnership ads are ads that are run from both your account and a creator's account. So, you can hire creators, influencers to produce, usually video ad creative promoting your products and services. And then when you run them, they will be run from those two accounts, yours and theirs. Hence why it's called a partnership ad. It's effectively influencer marketing but not reliant on the organic distribution of their posts, but you could actually put budget behind it and advertise and run it to their audience. And there's a number of reasons why you might want to do so.
Firstly, it's a quick and easy way to produce a lot more ad creative because you're not doing it yourself. Secondly, if you work with the right people and they have influence over your target market, they have scroll stopping power. People are more likely to pay attention, so your hook rate improves. That's a big deal that should not be underestimated. Thirdly, their recommendation carries weight. So when they say you should go and buy this product or service, if it's someone that is respected in your space, people are more likely to do it as opposed to that recommendation coming from someone they don't know or from someone within your company. Fourthly, partnership ads can really help you build a brand over time. Because if you work with creators over an extended period of time, the creators that you work with, people will start to associate with your business and your business will take on the values and the things that people think about those creators. Means you need to pick well in the first place, but it can be a great way to build a brand. Also, when you're working with influencers, creators, they're normally pretty good at producing creative assets. otherwise they wouldn't have become an influencer, a creator in the first place. So, it's a great way to get really high quality ad creative that a lot of businesses just aren't capable of producing themselves.
Now, of course, it costs money to go out and hire these people, but if you choose right, you are more than likely going to recoup the cost pretty quickly in terms of increased ad efficiency. If you take 10% of your advertising budget, for example, and pay that to creators, but that creator makes your ad campaign 40% more effective, that's a great trade. You should do that every time. And I see that come up again and again. And Meta have a really simple free tool that you can use to make finding creators to work with, contacting them really easy. So, if I jump back into my example ad account, I'm in campaigns. If I go ahead and click on all tools and I can come down here to the creator marketplace and then from within here, I can easily find creators to work with. Meta even gives recommendations around the creators most relevant for you. I've created a whole video around the creative marketplace, how it works, how to go through it properly. You can find that on my channel and go ahead and check that out. But just wanted to quickly show you how easy this process can be.
Strategy number five is to use the creative testing tool. A lot of advertisers have run into issues post Andromeda when it comes to testing new ad creative. I've already talked about wanting a lot more ad creative, so we want to test to find out what's working, what's not. A lot of advertisers are running into problems where they upload new ad creative, add that into an existing adset, and it just gets no ad spend whatsoever, and it feels pointless, like a complete waste of time. The existing best performers just continue to get all the ad spend. So, I've seen advertisers do all sorts of things with like separate campaigns and testing setups. It can get very complicated very quickly. You can end up with fragmented data. Not the way to go. Much better to use the creative testing tool.
So, let's go back into my example ad account. And we haven't got any campaigns in here. So, let's just quickly create an example campaign. Let's go with a sales campaign. And I'm just going to jump straight to the ad level, which is where you will find the creative testing tool. And I'm going to scroll down, and it's just here beneath where you add in your ad creative. And if I click on here, I can click on setup test. And you can test two to five different ads simultaneously. You can tell meta how much of your budget you want to spend on this test, how long you want this test to run, and then what do you want to compare performance? I would absolutely recommend changing from say cost per post engagement to something like cost per lead or cost per purchase or whatever it is that you're actually optimizing for in a campaign. That might mean you need to add in extra time, extra budget to make it work, etc. Click confirm and then what you do is this will produce five different test ads. You go into each one of those ads and you add in the different ad creative and this will do a proper test. Meta will segment out your audience into five different chunks and make sure they don't overlap. So you can properly test to see ad creative A, how does it perform against ad creative B. If you're producing new ad creative and adding them to your campaigns, your existing campaigns, your existing adset, you can use this to make sure they actually get spend and you find out if they're working or not or whether you're just completely wasted your time and potentially money on on getting those things created. So yeah, big fan of the creative testing tool. Not many advertisers know about it. Even fewer use it, but I certainly recommend it.
Strategy number six is to not use a separate retargeting campaign or even a separate retargeting ads set. Instead, we like to combine the two and run a hybrid so your ads are being delivered to a combination of warm and cold audiences. Why do we do that? Because no matter how you set up your targeting, it is very likely that Meta is going to target a mixture of cold and warm audiences. Anyway, I talked in a previous point about defining your audience segment. And one of the reasons is so that you can go down into the breakdown information and you can break down your results but also your spend by new audience, engaged audience, and existing customers. When you do that in an adset that is set up to be a retargeting adset, and then you compare the results to an adset that is set up to be a cold audience adset, often you will find that the split in terms of spend between new audience, engaged audience, and existing customers is exactly the same. And why does Meta do this? Because most of your targeting inputs are suggestions. When you set up an adset to be a warm audience adset, you add in your warm audiences, your custom audiences as targeting, but you do so as a suggestion in the suggest an audience section as opposed to within the uh controls within the hard targeting constraints. So, Meta has the flexibility to target other people. If you're targeting more open, more cold audiences, Meta is absolutely going to find your warm audiences. Those are the people that are most likely to engage with your ads. Those are the people that Meta will quickly identify as most likely to purchase, become a lead, whatever it is you're optimizing for, and Meta is going to put ads in front of them. So, if the two different campaigns or two different adsets, one one cold, are going to be the same from a distribution standpoint anyway, you might as well combine them so that you don't have fragmented data. We consolidate that data. One ad campaign producing 50 conversions a week is much better than two ad campaigns producing 25 conversions a week because getting out of the learning phase, you're not being caught in learning limited. Meta has more data to optimize. You have more data as the advertiser to be able to assess things and make optimization decisions. So, we rarely have separate retargeting campaigns. Now, there are circumstances where we do. I've got another video going into more detail on this so you can check out on my channel, but by default, we're not going to retarget separately.
Quick one before we continue. If you're running meta ads and you'd like me to take a look at your actual ad account and tell you what I would change, test, or scale, I've built something called the Ben Heath Inner Circle. Inside, you get direct access to me for less than $60 per live session where you can join, ask me questions, and even share your ad account for live feedback. And these sessions are scheduled across multiple time zones, so you can join from wherever you are in the world. So, if you're dealing with performance dropping, creative not working, or you're unsure how to scale, you can bring it to a live session and we'll go through it together. If you want to check it out, there's a link in the video description. Let's get back to the video.
Strategy number seven is to focus your initial acquisition on free/inexpensive products or services or go to the other end of the spectrum and go high price point, premium luxury, high ticket, highouch sales process. I think the mid-range is often the hardest particularly to scale. It's where most of your competitors are, so it's difficult to differentiate just for starters. But if you just think about the economics of it, if you're offering something free or inexpensive, you want that to be as cheap and as operationally efficient for your business as possible, something that you can give away. It's just not going to be very difficult for you to deliver on that. Or you want to go to the other extreme where you can have all the bells and whistles and all the high touch points and the sales calls and the proposal documents and the follow-up processes because when you actually do get a customer, you cover the cost of all that. In the mid-range, you're often high enough price where people want a bit more than something just easy automated, but you don't really make enough money from them to be able to justify an elongated sales process or, you know, something really complex. So, the more I've seen businesses that are outliers that really succeed with their meta ads, the more they tend to fall into one end or the other, like free or really, really inexpensive and easy for them to deliver on in the first place. What you might call a trip wire or, you know, let's do it all. Let's go with the absolute top end of the market and work with just a handful of clients, customers. They'll be incredibly valuable. A return on ad spend on those leads would be unbelievable. Yeah, that seems to be a better approach to go with.
And strategy number eight is to embrace WhatsApp and use it as part of your meta marketing funnels. Now, this is going to be location dependent to some extent. In the US, for example, people use WhatsApp a lot less than just about everywhere else in the world, but if your target audience is on WhatsApp regularly, then definitely experiment with a WhatsAppbased salesunnel. I've seen a lot of businesses having success with replacing their traditional processes with a WhatsAppbased funnel instead. So let's say previously people would click come through to a landing page book in a call or inquire. They then get contacted by the company to arrange a call. A lot of friction, slow process. How much easier is it for your prospect to just click on an ad, go straight into WhatsApp, send a few messages and those initial messages are all automated and people are filtered depending on, you know, you can find out whether they actually are a qualified lead or not. From then on, you can then progress into actually communicating with the person. And I think that a lot of prospects prefer that. They're like, "Well, why would I want to book a sales call for three days time and then I have to sit on the call and have them pitch me the thing and then I've got to get the document afterwards and then I follow up. It's slow and it's cumbersome and it's friction and people are busy." Whereas on WhatsApp, it's like I could just send a few messages back and forth really quickly, find out whether or not I like this product or service and then go ahead and make a purchase decision. It also has the advantage that that's often quite a bit cheaper for the business to operate than a traditional say lead uh sales call funnel structure. In a market like the UK at the moment, you're going to have more success if you're high ticket with this type of thing with WhatsApp as opposed to low ticket. But that doesn't apply worldwide. If you're in India, Brazil for example, you can sell anything on WhatsApp, low ticket included. So I would predict that in the next 5 to 10 years, WhatsApp's going to make real inroads into the US market as well. And then this will apply there too. In the meantime, for everyone else or people who are advertising to people in in other locations, uh definitely something to experiment with. And if you want to know more about how to advertise using WhatsApp, you can check out this video here. In it, I walk through the entire process of creating a click to WhatsApp campaign. I also show you some of the other things you could do as a marketer. Things like marketing messages on WhatsApp. Yes, you can send messages to people that have interacted on WhatsApp, which is incredibly powerful in certain circumstances, of course. So, if you haven't already, go ahead and check this